I was thinking about buying a few more microSD cards and/or thumbdrives during the upcoming Black Friday sales (these are always on sale then). So, I did some speed testing of stuff that I had so I would know what to buy/avoid. I found some BIG differences in speed. All testing was done on the same computer, using the same USB3 port and the same software. Thumbdrives plug right into the port, microSD cards require a card reader. I have two USB3 card readers that I used. One is made by Samsung and one is made by Rocketek. Photos below of the results. Each photo is a cut-n-paste of two or three pictures. Each includes a pic of the reader, the microSD card, and the results. In the case of thumbdrives there are only two things: a pic of the thumbdrive and a pic of the results. The pictures of the devices I grabbed from the Amazon website so you can see the current prices for each.
If you don't want to read through all the boring details below, just run out an get this one, it blows ALL the others away. By a large margin. AND it's as cheap or cheaper than the others.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0C1PP1T29?ref=ppx_yo2ov_dt_b_product_details&th=1
This one is only $12.99 for BOTH the 128gb microSD card AND the card reader!
The attached images below start with a series of numbers. That tells you what you need to know without having to open the picture itself. You will see the files are named like this example:
185_165R_20W_Sandisk_64gb_USB3_thumbdrive.jpg
[edit] I was expecting that when I posted the links, that the filenames would be shown. But that's not the case. What shows up are little picture representations of the larger pictures. I would have sworn that filenames were part of that, but I guess I was wrong. Oh well! But on the plus side, the little pictures are large enough that you can read the speed test results - which is the information that the filenames included. [/edit]
This means the combined read speed PLUS the write speed is 185MB/s, the read speed is 165MB/s, and the write speed is 20MB/s. The rest of this filename only says "Sandisk 64gb" and Sandisk makes a lot of different versions of thumbdrives, so you may want to open the pic to see exactly which of those versions I was testing.
Note that the winner (by far!) is the Samsung ProPlus microSD card when using the Samsung card reader. This one is 314_179R_135W. That is faster than a hard drive!!! Of course an SSD will beat it, but the fact that it lives up to it's published specs and performed at this level on my computer was a very welcome finding. The dog of the group was the Lexar It's USB3 and claims up to 250MB/s read speed. Ha! I only got 62_45R_17W out of it. That is just pitiful. Horrible. They claim 250MB/s but it actually delivers 44MB/s. Stay away from that one.
OK, here are the results. Ordered from best to worst, based on the combined read PLUS write number. Note that some have a high overall number, but it is very asymmetrical. e.g., 165MB/s read but only 20MB/s write. this would be fine for booting and running an OS off of that thumbdrive, since that will be much more reading than writing. But it would suck in a camera, where you write much more than you read (not that you can put a thumbdrive in a camera, you'd need a microSD card for that, but you get what I'm saying). Click on each thumbnail to see a bigger image.
If you don't want to read through all the boring details below, just run out an get this one, it blows ALL the others away. By a large margin. AND it's as cheap or cheaper than the others.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0C1PP1T29?ref=ppx_yo2ov_dt_b_product_details&th=1
This one is only $12.99 for BOTH the 128gb microSD card AND the card reader!
The attached images below start with a series of numbers. That tells you what you need to know without having to open the picture itself. You will see the files are named like this example:
185_165R_20W_Sandisk_64gb_USB3_thumbdrive.jpg
[edit] I was expecting that when I posted the links, that the filenames would be shown. But that's not the case. What shows up are little picture representations of the larger pictures. I would have sworn that filenames were part of that, but I guess I was wrong. Oh well! But on the plus side, the little pictures are large enough that you can read the speed test results - which is the information that the filenames included. [/edit]
This means the combined read speed PLUS the write speed is 185MB/s, the read speed is 165MB/s, and the write speed is 20MB/s. The rest of this filename only says "Sandisk 64gb" and Sandisk makes a lot of different versions of thumbdrives, so you may want to open the pic to see exactly which of those versions I was testing.
Note that the winner (by far!) is the Samsung ProPlus microSD card when using the Samsung card reader. This one is 314_179R_135W. That is faster than a hard drive!!! Of course an SSD will beat it, but the fact that it lives up to it's published specs and performed at this level on my computer was a very welcome finding. The dog of the group was the Lexar It's USB3 and claims up to 250MB/s read speed. Ha! I only got 62_45R_17W out of it. That is just pitiful. Horrible. They claim 250MB/s but it actually delivers 44MB/s. Stay away from that one.
OK, here are the results. Ordered from best to worst, based on the combined read PLUS write number. Note that some have a high overall number, but it is very asymmetrical. e.g., 165MB/s read but only 20MB/s write. this would be fine for booting and running an OS off of that thumbdrive, since that will be much more reading than writing. But it would suck in a camera, where you write much more than you read (not that you can put a thumbdrive in a camera, you'd need a microSD card for that, but you get what I'm saying). Click on each thumbnail to see a bigger image.
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